The U.S. must meet its electricity demands to win the AI war with China, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Breitbart News’s Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle during Wednesday’s policy event, “A Conversation with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.”
“I was meeting with a mining company that’s been working on a copper mine permit, and they’re on year 29 on getting a U.S. copper mine, and we need more copper than ever,” Burgum said, laying out how bureaucracy has clogged up American progress in the energy sector.
“But yes, it’s just — it is. It’s beyond the level of absurdity. The obstructions we’ve done to kill mining — AI is different than any other kind of data center. If you might say, oh, we’ve had data centers for a long time. There’s a bunch of them here in Virginia. [A] data center that is processing a shopping order from, say, a large online retailer, or a data center that’s processing a health claim. That’s one … thing. I mean, it’s like, yeah, we’re going to use this big data center. We’re going to do in the cloud, artificial intelligence. We take electricity and an AI data center. We manufacture intelligence,” he said, emphasizing, “We’re manufacturing intelligence.”
“Who uses that intelligence? These are general purpose tools that go to every — go to, they’ll go to your jobs. Every job is going to be affected. It doesn’t matter, education, health care, the law, government, certainly. I mean, government has to. We were trying to add as much AI as we could to the jobs in North Dakota,” he said, explaining that in many ways, AI cannot be beat as you can essentially have a virtual assistant who “speaks 27 languages, can code and can write all the first drafts of your reports for you.”
“I mean, it’s basically free. It’s so cheap, it’s free. And so we can take it like when I looked at it through the government lens. We take every job, get rid of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking work that we asked government team members to do, because they’re stuck in 1990s technology of permitting and processes and paper and old technology and old systems and business flows that have never been improved. We can take all that, do business process improvement, and give them a job that is meaningful and purposeful and actually makes a difference in our country. That’s what we can do. And this is the power and literally, it’s like things are unimaginable,” he said.
“Can you imagine 10 percent GDP? … I mean, we could have massive increases in productivity with a tool, but it’s tool of AI. But we need electricity to make that happen, and we don’t have enough,” he said, explaining that this is where China comes in again, as it is a major competitor.
“China, last year,” he began, got “60 percent of their electricity from coal. Thirty percent of the world’s electricity comes from coal, 60 percent of China’s comes from coal. They added 94.5 gigawatts of coal. One gigawatt is Denver. So they added 94 Denver’s in 52 weeks. They’re basically opening up two coal plants a week, at a time when we’re trying to shut all of ours down,” Burgum said, laying out the dire state of affairs.
“And if there’s a coal plant running in America — clean, beautiful, coal, as President Trump likes to call it, which is true, because if it’s running today in America, it has survived a 20-year attack of everything imaginable,” Burgum said, explaining that if there is a coal plant in the United States, it is the “cleanest in the world.”
“If you care about the environment, you should be insistent that every electron and every ounce, every gallon, is produced in the U.S. because we’re producing it better, cleaner, smarter, healthier, safer than anywhere else in the world. This idea that we’re going to outsource, we’re going to shut ourselves down and outsource to other people — that is bad for the environment,” he said, debunking one of the main arguments of leftist environmentalists.
In all, America needs to produce more of its own energy, he continued, because so many things — like the AI war with China — are directly attached.
As an example of what they are trying to do to get back on track, Burgum said they are trying to get “Constitution pipeline back, going again in the state of New York.”
“It’s only 124 miles we have. We have hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline in this country, and a little 124-mile connector that got stopped by a state water permit is the reason why people in Connecticut pay $2,300 more per family a year to heat their homes, because their prices are high,” he said.
“We’ve turned New England into an island. We’ve turned it into something like Hawaii, where they can’t get access to low-cost electricity and low-cost clean U.S. natural gas coming all the way from Pennsylvania,” Burgum added.
WATCH the full conversation below:
Read the full article here